For users on our Business and eCommerce Plans, plugins are a critical part of the WordPress.com experience. We’re always looking for ways to simplify the process of discovering and installing powerful WordPress plugins.As a result, we’re now making it possible to purchase certain plugins directly on the WordPress.com plugin page. Not only that, but WordPress.com will offer monthly and annual plugin pricing which provides site owners more flexibility.Initially, you can purchase six of our most popular WooCommerce plugins on the WordPress.com plugins page.WooCommerce Subscriptions — Allow customers to subscribe to your products or services and pay on a weekly, monthly or annual basis.WooCommerce Bookings — Allow customers to book appointments, make reservations or rent equipment without leaving your site.WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping — Advanced, flexible shipping. Define multiple shipping rates based on location, price, weight, shipping class or item count.WooCommerce AutomateWoo — Powerful marketing automation for WooCommerce. AutomateWoo has the tools you need to grow your store and make more money.WooCommerce Shipment Tracking — Add shipment tracking information to your orders.WooCommerce Xero — Save time with automated sync between WooCommerce and your Xero account.Purchasing a plugin via the new WordPress.com interface is simple. On the plugins page, click on one of the paid plugin cards to be redirected to a detailed product listing page. When you’re ready, click the purchase button in the top right of the product listing page. Your purchase won’t be final until you confirm your payment method and details on the following page. The plugin will be installed automatically.This announcement is just the start — look for more paid plugins and other exciting updates over the coming months. Let us know in the comments below what plugins you would like to see available for purchase directly on WordPress.com.Stay tuned and click here to begin exploring plugins now!As a reminder, all plugins (free or paid) are currently only available to customers with a WordPress.com Business or eCommerce Plan. If you’re interested in purchasing or upgrading to an annual Business Plan, click here for a 25% discount off your first year.Promo code: PLUGINSBLOG25
Launching a website or learning how to monetize your online store can be overwhelming. But we are here to help you along the way. We are hosting free webinars to help get you on track and answer any questions you have. We cover different topics and will soon have new ones. Make sure to bookmark the Webinars page for upcoming webinars. In the meantime, check out our January webinars.The timezones are in UTC but you can click the time to see it in your own timezone.Getting Started Mondays 1900 UTCTuesdays 1000 UTCWednesdays 0600 UTCThursdays 1900 UTCFridays 1600 UTCMaking MoneyGet the specific dates and registration forms at https://wordpress.com/webinars/Who’s Invited: New WordPress.com users and anyone interested in learning more about WordPress.com’s website capabilities.Our WordPress.com customer service team, we call them Happiness Engineers, are experts in helping new users get up and running on their new websites. Across each week of webinars, we’ll cover questions about the basics of setting up your website, handling simple and recurring payments, blogging best practices, and adding in eCommerce capabilities. Come with questions as you’ll be able to make them during the live webinar.Everyone is welcome, even if you already have a site set up. We know you’re busy, so if you can’t make the live event, you’ll be able to watch a recording of the webinar on our YouTube channel.Live attendance is limited, so be sure to register early. We look forward to seeing you on the webinar!
Christine Grimaldi lives in Washington, D.C., where she covers reproductive rights and policy and writes essays about history and culture. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Vice, Self, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Dame, The Rumpus, and other publications. She tweets at @chgrimaldi.Editor: Seyward DarbyArt Director: Ed JohnsonCopy Editor: Sean CooperFact Checker: Naomi SharpPublished in January 2022.1.Jennie Otranto slept on the same floors that she scrubbed clean. She was the Lord’s humble servant, too intimidated to ask her employer, the woman she called Reverend Mother, for a spare bedroom. Unlike the innkeeper in the story of Christ’s birth, Reverend Mother had ample space, especially compared with her parishioners, who lived in packed row houses and cold-water flats that rattled to the roll of Brooklyn’s elevated trains. Reverend Mother never even offered her maid a blanket. Jennie made do with her own coat and a small rug—if her minister-turned-master’s Scottish terrier and Siamese cat relinquished a favorite sleeping spot.Come morning, Jennie shook out her coat and any fur that stuck to it. She smoothed the wrinkles left overnight in her clothes. Her scallop-edged top and skirt are crisp in a black-and-white photo old enough to be from her domestic tenure. In one hand, she clutches a box of Super Suds detergent, perhaps to wash dinner remnants off Reverend Mother’s plates or clothes—the brand’s tagline was “floods o’ suds for dishes and duds.” A fistful of Jennie’s hair is coiled around a barrette pinned just above her forehead, while the rest falls to her shoulders. The dark circles under her eyes seem to give the truth away: Jennie is a profile in exhaustion.The circumstances of her employment amounted to forced labor. According to the 1940 census, 22-year-old Jennie earned $650 a year as a maid, and 54-year-old Reverend Mother made nothing as a pastor—a double-barreled lie meant to protect the person who told it. Jennie reaped no earthly rewards under the arrangement reached about a decade earlier between her mother, Serafina, and Reverend Mother. A friend had told Serafina about a woman who performed miracles out of a Pentecostal storefront church on 69th Street, also called Bay Ridge Avenue. It seemed as if only miracles could soothe Serafina’s arthritic joints, which confined the 40-something mother of six to bed for weeks at a time. So she went to the church, which largely drew from Brooklyn’s Italian immigrant enclave of Bensonhurst. As many as 200 self-proclaimed “full believers” sought cameos in Reverend Mother’s prayers and remedies from her “holy napkins,” pieces of cloth she anointed with oil over which she’d prayed. Reverend Mother preached that no other church in the world understood the Bible like La Cappella dei Miracoli (the Chapel of Miracles) did. And make no mistake: She was the church.Reverend Mother expected full believers to pay for her grace, one way or another. Like many church leaders, she cited Bible verses to justify collecting a 10 percent tithe from her followers’ poverty-level wages. She went a step further, commissioning “scouts” to find families tending to dying relatives so that she could pray with them—and claim 10 percent on the relatives’ wills. But nothing was ever enough for Reverend Mother, and she levied the first of many egregious tolls on Serafina’s family around 1930. “After a while she had a stronger hold on us,” Jennie later wrote, “and decided that I should go live with her as her maid.” Serafina agreed. She considered her eldest daughter a gift to God.Jennie’s delivery into involuntary servitude marked the end of her formal education. Eighth grade was as far as she’d go. Reverend Mother squeezed everything she could out of Jennie and her family. She once instructed Jennie to pull her mother aside after a church service to discuss Serafina’s life insurance policy. “Tell her, ‘Mom, God was good to you, why don’t you cash that policy and give the money to Reverend Mother?’ Letting it sound like it came from me,” Jennie recalled. The Great Depression plunged Jennie’s parents into darkness more than once when they couldn’t pay their electricity bill. Still, Serafina gave Reverend Mother the $200 or $250 her insurance policy was worth.Teenage Jennie cleaned, cooked, and worshiped without complaint, but by the early 1940s, after a period in which she was sent back to her family, only to be enlisted as an unpaid maid again when it suited Reverend Mother, the twentysomething version of Jennie had to be stopped from testing the limits of her employer’s power. “As time wore on living under these conditions my patience was waning. One day, I don’t remember what happened. I might have answered her abruptly,” Jennie wrote. “She happened to have a metal can in her hand and banged it on my head.”The can sliced into Jennie’s scalp. She pressed a Turkish towel to her head, but its fibers couldn’t absorb the blood flowing through her hair and down her neck. “Reverend Mother saw all this but did not try to help or even care,” Jennie wrote. “I then left her home without saying a word.”It was nighttime. Where would she sleep? Grown women in Brooklyn often lived with their families until marriage, but Jennie’s parents would offer no refuge. Her father, Frank, was even more devoted to Reverend Mother than Serafina was. Reverend Mother regularly dispatched him to the homes of delinquent parishioners. “I would go and ask them how they felt and why they did not come to church,” he later told authorities. Jennie feared her father would force—or beat—her back into servitude. “Having no place to go, I rode the trains all night,” Jennie wrote.The next morning, she went to see Serafina. Jennie mentioned only that she and Reverend Mother had had a “misunderstanding.” What happened next sounds a lot like love bombing—the showering of appreciation by abusers, narcissists, and cult leaders to overwhelm a target’s resistance. “When Reverend Mother realized where I was, she called and sweet talked me into going back,” Jennie wrote. “Why wouldn’t she? She missed having a good free maid.”Jennie returned to work, but only in body. Her soul was her own. Reverend Mother, it seemed, had reached the limit of her power.Reverend Mother preached that no other church in the world understood the Bible like La Cappella dei Miracoli did. And make no mistake: She was the church.Nanny picked me up from elementary school every day of my childhood on Staten Island. The moms of my classmates idled outside their cars, gossiping. Nanny was the only grandmother in the crowd. We met each other with hugs and kisses, and our ride home never began until we raced to see whether Nanny’s automatic seat belt, a fixture of some 1990s cars, would cinch into place before I could latch my manual strap in the back seat. I inevitably won, but the thrill of my victory was never tainted by any agony of her defeat on her part. Nanny celebrated my safety.Among my few after-school obligations were the weekly catechism classes that would rub off like a temporary tattoo once I got older. Nanny waited in her silver Toyota Camry while I was taught Catholicism’s particular brand of shame. She also took me to borrow books from the Great Kills Library, and to buy Archie comics at a store kitty-corner from a Sedutto ice cream shop. Occasionally, on the way home, we stopped by Dazzle Cleaners, where my parents, Nanny’s son and daughter-in-law, sweated as many as 14 hours a day, six days a week. But Mom and Dad preferred I stay away from their business, especially in the summer months, when the boilers spiked the heat index in the store, making it a sauna with none of the health benefits.Home was in the Honey Bee Condominiums behind the Staten Island Mall. There, Nanny and I settled into our afternoon routines, starting with homework. I recited my vocabulary words, and she paged through a dictionary for the corresponding definitions. I wrote short stories, only remembering to cram in the assigned words at the end, while Nanny wrapped breaded chicken cutlets around cubes of mozzarella (mutzadell in Brooklynese) or formed tiny meatballs for minestrone soup. She could also put together a solid kids’ menu whenever my best friends, Andrea and Jen, came over to cosplay Buffy the Vampire Slayer with fake wooden stakes or Clueless with our teddy-bear backpacks. We loved Nanny’s English muffin pizzas with homemade sauce and her grilled cheese sandwiches made with Kraft Singles.Depending on their nightly ETA, we ate dinner with one or both of my parents. Mom and Dad worked harder and longer than I ever have, or will, to fuel the last segment of their white flight from Brooklyn to Staten Island to New Jersey, a path worn by many Italian Americans before them. Living with my long-widowed paternal grandmother for six months was supposed to help our little family save for a house in the suburbs. We stayed for seven years.From the time I was five through the summer after my twelfth birthday, Nanny was a constant in my life. I never missed one of her Saturday morning beauty parlor appointments at the Staten Island Mall. Weekday mornings, she power walked through the mall’s corridors with her septuagenarian friends. I gave Nanny a set of one-pound pink weights that she pumped through the Cinnabon-scented air, and during summer vacations I’d join the group now and then for a bialy in the food court. On many afternoons and evenings, fueled by homemade rugelach or pound cake, I was dealt in to card games with Nanny’s friends at our dining room table. Other nights, just the two of us, Nanny and I played round after round of Rummikub, the tile game that “brings people together.”Oftentimes we snuggled on the den sofa to watch our shows: General Hospital bleeding into Oprah, and The Golden Girls in perpetual syndication. The sofa contained the folded-up mattress where Nanny slept after insisting that my parents take the only bedroom in her condo. It was there that we wore out The Goonies, Home Alone, and the rest of my VHS collection, supplementing them with Lifetime melodramas and the classics starring Audrey or Katharine Hepburn. On Friday nights, I’d curl into Nanny for an hour of Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters. We were devoted to the golden era of 20/20, and to each other. “You’re my shadow,” Nanny would say.Our bedtime routine was an exercise in role reversal: I tucked Nanny in with many kisses and traced the sign of the cross on her papery forehead, smoothing the wrinkles up, down, left, right, with my thumb. She smelled of Noxzema and hair spray. After I lay down in my bed in the windowless nook next to the den, I often snuck back into Nanny’s room, drawing close to check that she was still breathing. She was a generation older than my friends’ grandmothers. My copy of Claudia and the Sad Good-bye, the Baby-Sitters Club book about the death of the protagonist’s beloved grandmother, Mimi, was my only guide for navigating the inevitable.My parents and I moved to New Jersey in 1998, and Nanny took over the sofa bed in our new house about five years later. We both had senioritis: I was 18, and she was 86. I was filling out college applications as her health was declining, due largely to congestive heart failure. Claudia and the Sad Good-bye was still wedged between the more mature literature on my bookshelf the night an ambulance arrived at our house. Something was wrong with Nanny. “Bring the living will!” she yelled at Dad as the medics prepared to take her to the hospital. Mom stayed behind and tried to prepare me for the worst. In a big teenage mood, I sobbed as much to drown her out as from sadness. Nanny was not going to die that night if I had anything to do with it.I didn’t, of course, but she lived anyway. My teenage hubris validated, I made a deal with Nanny: She just had to make it to my college graduation. In retrospect, it was a cringeworthy framing her chronic illness as a battle to be won or lost. Yet Nanny’s health improved. We had four more years of summer vacations, secrets, and frank discussions about politics and sexuality. Nanny watched me take my first dose of birth control, and she opposed the Catholic Church’s anti-abortion teachings long before I rejected them. She was the most open-minded adult in my culturally conservative young life, which isn’t to say she was perfect. Though she never used the N-word or its Italian-American stand-in, derived from the word for eggplant, she occasionally toggled between color-blind and coded racism, which I in turn absorbed. She believed that in his twenties my father had lost out on a job because of affirmative action, though in truth Dad probably wasn’t qualified for the position, with his two semesters of college and a life that revolved around hanging out in bars and on street corners, where the police never bothered him and his friends.I wish Nanny and I had discussed the things we were wrong about and why. But there wouldn’t be time. Nanny’s lungs started filling with liquid during the last semester of my senior year of college. I brought my cap and gown home so we could re-create the graduation ceremony she was too weak to attend. She died five months later, on October 14, 2008.I had dreaded Nanny’s death for so long that when it happened, it didn’t seem real. I never cried. Tears flowed from small disappointments in newsroom jobs and from bigger ones I dated in my early twenties. It was easier to feel gutted over someone I thought was my soul mate than to recognize that my soul mate had come and gone.I knew that Nanny and her younger siblings shared secrets. I had caught the occasional whisper about abuse: physical, emotional, spiritual. Then, a few years after Nanny died, I learned that these dark memories had been committed to paper.At my great-uncle Joey’s urging, his three sisters had joined him in writing testimonials about their childhood. Late in life, Joey left Catholicism for an evangelical church and gave the testimonials to a fellow parishioner, who in turn produced a short, spiral-bound book called “Bazaar [sic] but True.” Apparently, Joey believed I could do a better job with the story the book told. He approached my mom about it before I left for college. She told him it was too much for me then, but I’d tell the story eventually. Later, when I started a graduate program in creative nonfiction, my dad’s cousin Patricia gave me copies of the testimonials.In looping, spindly script, the documents revealed that, while I may have been Nanny’s shadow, she also had a ghost. Nanny, whose real name was Genevieve “Jennie” Grimaldi, née Otranto, was haunted her whole life by the specter of Josephine Carbone, a woman as cruel as she was charismatic. Carbone was better known, to both her followers and her critics, as Reverend Mother.Nanny and I had talked about everything else—why not this? I summoned a memory, a Turkish towel soaked with blood, an echo from a phone conversation in a nearby room. My childhood instinct had been to file away such things instead of asking Nanny about them. But even if I had asked, I don’t know that she would have had the heart to tell me the truth.A decade after Nanny died, I quit my latest journalism job, in no small part to investigate what happened to the love of my life. The testimonials were the starting point. With government records and newspaper clippings, the memories of the few churchgoers who are still alive and the descendants of those who aren’t, I pieced together the narrative of Reverend Mother’s rise to power and her eventual downfall. I learned the stories of families who, like the Otrantos, were all but destroyed by La Cappella dei Miracoli. In studying the one chapter of my grandmother’s life she never shared with me, I found a sense of purpose.Nanny may have been shielding me from her pain, but in doing so she also gave me a final gift. Her secret was my inheritance.Screams rose in Lucia Della Contrada’s throat the morning of February 3, 1886, as she labored to deliver a child. She had little to offer another son and even less to a daughter. Her husband, Antonio Stabile—pronounced “stah-bee-lay”—was a peasant farmer in Frasso Telesino, a small comune located some 25 miles and a world away from the greater Campania region’s capital city, Naples. Poor farmers like Antonio, known as contadini, rarely had land of their own—they worked the estates of absentee landlords.Class resentment was flourishing in the new Kingdom of Italy, established in 1861, at the height of a bloody unification movement, the Risorgimento. Cooked up in the north, the Risorgimento compressed various sovereign entities into a kind of geographical forcemeat approximating the shape of a boot. The kingdom left a bad aftertaste in the hungry mouths of the Italian south, the Mezzogiorno often racialized and eroticized in popular culture. Some Europeans still whisper about their continent ending at Naples—“Calabria, Sicily, and all the rest belong to Africa,” the saying goes. Armed with calipers, the late 19th-century pseudoscientist Cesare Lombroso, who hailed from fair Verona, measured what he believed was an innate potential for delinquency in physical characteristics common to southern Italians. “Born criminal,” he declared.This was the cold world that Lucia and Antonio’s child entered at nine o’clock that February morning. It was a girl. They named her Maria Giuseppa Stabile.Vital records offer little more than proof of Maria’s existence. They are the stars in the constellation of a life, the shape of which I can only approximate. One record indicates that Maria grew up an only child. What happened to Vincenzo, born three and a half years before her, and Giovanna, who came along in 1889? A birth certificate can’t reveal whether Lucia scolded or comforted Maria through tummy aches from eating too many sun-warmed grapes, or whether Maria’s grandmothers—Clementina on papa’s side, Giuliana on mamma’s—ever sang her lullabies as lyrical as their names.Maria was six when southern brigands rebelled against various municipalities and the national government that conspired to tax them into the ground. Perhaps Antonio and Lucia joined their ranks with homemade weapons. Almost certainly they prayed to God to get them through each day. Many contadini practiced a Catholic faith far removed from that of the gilded Vatican. For peasant women especially, spiritualism was an intimate source of agency, a venue for the quiet defiance of patriarchal institutions. Women built home altars that incorporated the Virgin Mary and the saints. Women laid their specific needs—bountiful harvests, rebel victories, healthy births, safe abortions—at the feet of the beatified, imitating their ancestors’ ritual offerings to pagan gods and goddesses. Many paintings and statues rendered the Virgin Mary with olive skin to match her supplicants’ hands. Some southern Italians worshipped La Madonna Nera (the Black Madonna).The holy trinity of anti-authoritarianism, regionalism, and spiritualism would have influenced Maria as she grew up. She never went to school. In 1905, she wed Alfonso Baccanale, a neighboring farmer’s son, 25 to her 19. A stillbirth and an infant who died at three months followed. In 1909, the couple decided to sail to America. They joined the contadini pouring into Italy’s salt-flecked Mediterranean ports, eager to set out for Brazil, Argentina, and the United States. Poverty wages from laying tracks, digging coal, hemming pants, and hammering soles in the new world, these emigrants hoped, would amount to more than they’d ever reaped from the old.The Baccanales’ union either didn’t survive the transatlantic journey or ended abruptly after, and what transpired doesn’t seem to have been a mutual parting of ways. When she later petitioned for American citizenship, Maria claimed that, after reaching the port of New York on September 30, 1909, she never lived with Alfonso. “Shortly after their arrival, she was informed by her father that Baccanale had returned to Italy,” her paperwork states. “She commenced to live with one Philip Carbone and in 1910 a child was born.”Based on baby Caterina’s date of birth, Maria could have conceived her with Alfonso on their voyage from Italy, or immediately thereafter with Philip, who still went by Filippo in those days. Either way, Filippo gave the infant his last name, and he and Maria eventually married in a 1919 civil ceremony in Brooklyn. Maria Giuseppa Baccanale officially became Giuseppina Carbone without divorcing her first husband or disclosing his existence to Brooklyn’s deputy city clerk.There was a sole witness at the wedding: Mildred Zollo. More than a name on a vital record, Mildred, whose mother was Sister Josephine Zollo, a Brooklyn preacher, stands as the first evidence that the new Mrs. Carbone had crossed another ocean, a spiritual one. She had left the folk Catholicism of southern Italy for Pentecostalism, an American creation she would soon transform into something uniquely her own.Women laid their specific needs—bountiful harvests, rebel victories, healthy births, safe abortions—at the feet of the beatified, imitating their ancestors’ ritual offerings to pagan gods and goddesses.How does a false prophet rise to power?In 1919 Brooklyn, Giuseppina Carbone is another racially suspect “dark white” immigrant with empty pockets and waning faith in the indifferent-to-hostile ’merigan Catholic Church. The staid Irish priests don’t want to hear about mysticism—the nerve of these “guineas” to worship La Madonna Nera when everyone knows the Virgin Mary is as white as fresh Irish cream! Being southern Italian is the original sin that can’t be baptized away, even when Giuseppina and Filippo christen their two-year-old daughter at Our Lady of Loreto, the rare Brooklyn Catholic church built by and for Italian immigrants.Filippo is a laborer making $1.50 a day. Like many immigrant women, Giuseppina takes on piecework, in her case paid by the buttonhole. At least she works from home rather than in a tinderbox of a factory. Not long ago, on a clear, cold day in March 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 garment workers in Manhattan. Giuseppina resembles the mostly Italian and Jewish teenagers and young women who jumped to their deaths to escape the smoke or succumbed inside the factory’s locked doors, a so-called loss-prevention measure. She is dark-haired, dark-eyed, and just five feet tall. Her daughter may soon eclipse her. At almost nine years old, Caterina—“Catherine, Mamma!”—can read and write English, courtesy of P.S. 178.Giuseppina cannot expect much from life, until she hears Sister Josephine Zollo’s Italian sermons wafting through the air as she walks home one day, or a neighbor eagerly repeats them to her. Giuseppina’s mother tongue cleanses her like a newborn kitten. Salvation, she is told, can be hers.A Pentecostal awakening has been sweeping across America for a decade. In early April 1906, Brother William Joseph Seymour, the Catholic-reared son of formerly enslaved parents, moved his rapidly expanding prayer meetings into a run-down building on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. By then, he and his followers were speaking in tongues—a sign, they believed, of internal salvation, or “baptism in the Holy Spirit.” Seymour’s religious creation would be emulated, imitated, or appropriated, depending on who’s telling the story of its spread. In Chicago, Luigi Francescon and Pietro Ottolini spearheaded the world’s first Italian Pentecostal church, and before long the faith reached Brooklyn. Perhaps the promise of un miracolo drew Josephine Zollo to Brooklyn City Mission, a Pentecostal church in East New York. She had been ill before she first attended a service there in 1912. Whatever happened that day, Josephine’s health soon improved. She decided that the Lord had healed her body and saved her soul.Unlike Catholics’ solemn sprinkling of water on screeching infants, Pentecostal baptisms are often public statements of faith, made by people old enough to prepare for them. In Sister Zollo’s church, these immersions occur in Jamaica Bay—believers are dipped backward into the estuary like ballroom dance partners.When Giuseppina becomes an acolyte, Sister Zollo must push for her overdue marriage to Filippo, ten years after they got together. Cohabitation is worse than bigamy, given the circumstances. Judgment Day will surely end worse for Alfonso Baccanale, who had the nerve to strand his bride in a strange country, than for Giuseppina, who had the gumption to make sure someone was providing for her child. So off to the deputy city clerk the couple goes, with Sister Zollo’s daughter in tow.Giuseppina’s Pentecostal faith is an empowering departure from the imperial rituals of Catholicism. There is no private confession with a priest prescribing three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers as a cure-all for carnal sin, while he does God knows what behind closed doors. Pentecostals emphasize a direct line of communication with the divine. Why pray to Mary or the saints when you can repent to Gesù himself?No records will survive to indicate when Giuseppina begins preaching. Perhaps she starts small, testifying to the glory of God from her seat in Sister Zollo’s church. Perhaps Sister Zollo, recognizing Giuseppina’s talent, makes room for her at the pulpit, only to realize that she’s elevated a rival.Giuseppina returns to Frasso Telesino with 13-year-old Catherine in 1923. On paper she attributes their five-month journey to visiting her parents. She would be wise to omit any mention of mission work to bolster the nascent Pentecostal movement in Italy. Sister Zollo brought her faith to several towns in southern Italy, in the lead-up to the persecution of Pentecostals under Italy’s Fascist government. Giuseppina may or may not have dared to spread the word of the Lord in the old country, but upon her return to America, she commits the rest of her life to it.She abandons her piecework and begins preaching on street corners, including the intersection of Columbia and Woodhull, between Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, two Italian neighborhoods to the west of Sister Zollo’s territory. Catherine takes over her mother’s household duties, dropping out of school. Eventually, Giuseppina works her way up, which is to say indoors, securing a storefront on Hamilton Avenue and another building on Sackett Street where she can hold services.She adopts a name befitting her new American religion, translating Giuseppina to Josephine, and her mission soon attracts followers. She becomes one of many so-called miracle workers who provide succor in the space between her acolytes’ reality and the myth of their American Dream. It is the heyday of spiritual icons and grifters. Evangelical phenom Aimee Semple McPherson allegedly fakes her own kidnapping. The International Peace Mission’s Father Divine proclaims himself the second coming, a Black Jesus Christ, and splits his time between advocating against segregation and for reparations, and allegedly draining his followers of their assets for his own financial gain.As Josephine Carbone amasses her flock, reverence isn’t a guarantee. Among her congregants is Antonio DeVincenzo, a 35-year-old street sweeper, who attends services over the objections of his hot-tempered Catholic wife, Rosaria. One day, according to family lore, Rosaria chases Antonio out of the church with a rolling pin snatched from her tenement kitchen. Josephine presses a charge of disorderly conduct against 28-year-old Rosaria, demonstrating the lengths to which she’ll go to quash her critics. The local Standard Union provides perfunctory coverage of a court hearing held on September 21, 1927. “Magistrate Fish told the defendant religious freedom is a foundation stone of the American Government and if her husband wants to attend a mission [she] must not interfere in any way with the workers of the mission,” the paper states.Four months later, in January 1928, one family’s tragedy will bless Josephine with good fortune. Rosina “the Saint” Licata ministers a version of folk Catholicism out of her Brooklyn tenement until a disgruntled follower shoots her dead on her homemade altar. Rose leaves behind five children, who will be shunted to various orphanages and relatives. Her death also leaves a gap in her neighborhood, Bensonhurst, where her spiritual influence once dominated.Does Josephine recognize an opportunity after reading about Rosina’s death in the Brooklyn papers? Maybe, maybe not—but like Rosina, Josephine soon adopts an honorific nodding to Catholicism: She becomes Reverend Mother. By 1929, she’s rented another storefront, this one some 200 steps down 69th Street and across New Utrecht Avenue from where Licata had her humble mission. La Cappella dei Miracoli is born, in the same neighborhood where the Otranto family are making their way.MY GRANDMOTHER WAS BORN IN AMERICA. But, at age 3, her family went to live in Italy. She came back at age 8, on August 25, 1925.On the Luilio, the children became seasick from the swaying of the ship. My grandmother was one of those children. The cooks made pastina for them, but she couldn’t even eat that!Once again in America, the Otranto family resided in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. My great-grandfather delivered ice for a living. They moved, but to a different area in Bensonhurst. And, eventually, 12 years ago, my grandmother moved to Staten Island. Now we are back to the present.In this G-rated cut of her life, which Nanny dictated for my fifth-grade family-history homework, she edited out her personal pain. Here’s the story I wish I could submit to Mrs. Siomos, if she’s accepting extra credit in retirement: Between 1908 and 1926, my paternal great-grandmother, Serafina Acri Otranto, birthed at least eight children and raised the six who survived infancy. Louie, Al, Jennie, Gilda, Helen, and Joey wore their Americanized names like cornicello charms to ward off playground bullies. Serafina’s husband, Francesco, became Frank to the customers on his ice delivery route. Though America had perks, including indoor plumbing, the Otrantos must have longed for the embrace of their extended family and the ease of a familiar life in Rossano, their hometown in Calabria. “When it was time to do laundry, our mom would put a basketful on her head and with her children go to the river to wash her clothes,” my great-aunt Helen, who was born during one of her parents’ long visits to Italy, later wrote in her testimonial. “She would look for a large smooth stone to scrub the clothes on, then spread them on bushes to dry.… We would meet our cousins and it felt like we were on a picnic, even though all we had to eat was homemade bread and cheese.”Bucolic nature scenes, however, couldn’t counter emerging political threats. A Fascist upstart named Benito Mussolini became Italy’s prime minister in October 1922. Intentional or not, Frank’s departure—his last—for the United States that month made a political statement. He’d filed his initial paperwork for citizenship years earlier, and he naturalized in June 1924, two months after the enactment of a xenophobic U.S. law that restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and effectively cut it off from Asia.Serafina brought the children over on the Duilio—I misspelled the ship’s name on my homework—on August 25, 1925. America tried its damnedest to break the Otrantos. Icemen like Frank shouldered 100-pound blocks that bit through their coats in the winter and melted down their overalls in the summer. One slip on a damp staircase could end it all. Bensonhurst’s first-generation, scrape-kneed kids lingered near the cab of Frank’s truck, begging for free ice chips between sweaty rounds of kick the can. Their mothers struggled to keep them fed.Serafina shopped for the day’s meals in between preparing them, morning, noon, and night, for her growing family. Perhaps she wanted a brood of children, or perhaps she hesitated to pay for an illegal abortion or contraceptives with money that was her husband’s. When Serafina wasn’t stationed at the stove or the sink, she and her daughters cleaned the four-family home that the Otrantos shared, presumably with strangers, in exchange for rent. Soon, Serafina’s arthritis and migraines intensified to the point that she needed one of her girls home at all times. “One week Gilda would go two days and I would go three days, and the next week Gilda would go three days and I would go two days,” Jennie wrote of her experience with school. “It was very rough on us.”When Gilda contracted diphtheria, she somehow managed to quarantine from her siblings, despite the family living like sardines. Helen once saved Joey from drowning in a backyard wine barrel swollen with water—this after Joey nearly died from pneumonia three times before his first birthday. “My uncle started to clear out the front room for the wake, but God saved our little brother,” Gilda recalled of one such episode.At some point, along came Serafina’s friend, extolling Reverend Mother’s powers. Serafina couldn’t force her teenagers, Louie and Al, to attend nightly services at La Cappella dei Miracoli, but she insisted that her four youngest go. To tenement kids, the church seemed like a playground at first. “It was a novelty, and we enjoyed the music and singing,” Helen wrote. Gilda especially liked the jingle of the tambourine and the peal of the triangle played by congregants during hymns. Services were so loud that neighbors sometimes griped about the racket. “The owner of the apartment house next door to the church complained that he was always losing tenants the way they yell and carry on in the church,” a police officer once reported.But what seemed like merriment was really zeal, and what looked like participation was submission. The Otranto kids didn’t know it yet, but the music emanating from La Cappella dei Miracoli was a death knell: Once they heard it, their childhoods were over.From top: A newspaper clipping about the death of Rosina Licata; Helen, Jennie, Gilda, Serafina, Joey, and Frank Otranto.3.The full believers of La Cappella dei Miracoli assembled each weeknight in wooden folding chairs, waiting for services to begin at 7:30. They stared at a painting, based on Matthew 14:22–34, when Jesus encourages Peter to walk on water. Peter takes a few promising steps before doubt weighs him down into the sea: “And immediately Jesus stretched out His hand and caught him, and said to him, ‘O you of little faith, why did you doubt?’ ”When Reverend Mother appeared before her flock, she wore white—only ever white. She read verses and delivered sermons from an elevated platform behind an altar rail. Her appearance and position left no doubt about her power: Here was a pure, fierce force fending off the storm of human folly that afflicted anyone who doubted her authority.Sometimes she let her longtime chauffeur, a man named Sallustio Del Re, take the pulpit to preach. Other congregants testified to the miracles God had performed for them since they started attending La Cappella dei Miracoli. Maria “Christina” Tripi spoke again and again of how the Lord had cured her cancer. She was so grateful that she would raise three children, Phil, Charlie, and Sarah, in the church, while her sister Annie would become one of Reverend Mother’s most loyal associates. Throughout the 1930s until at least 1940, Annie once reported, she did “volunteer work, without pay, because the Lord did so many nice things for my family through the Reverend Mother’s prayers.” She added, “I sleep there all the time,” referring to Reverend Mother’s house.Helen Sebastiani gave exuberant praise to Reverend Mother, who had sprung the young mother from Kings County Psychopathic Hospital in December 1930. She “did so much for me that I have been all right ever since,” Helen later swore to authorities. “I have never been sick a day.” Helen and her husband, Louis, brought their two young sons, Gaetano and Eugene, to services, and they gave $800 to Reverend Mother in 1932. Other acolytes included Salvatore and Mamie Molinari, whose son Salvatore Jr. was Gaetano Sebastiani’s close friend.Anna Grasso and her younger sisters, Mary, Josephine, and Rose, attended the church over the objections of their elder brothers, Santo and Peter, who owned a bakery on Fort Hamilton Parkway. The Grasso brothers were rumored to keep their sisters off the bakery payroll, lest their wages support the church. In lieu of giving tithes, Anna volunteered her services as the church’s secretary and even lived with Reverend Mother for a year after her own mother died, returning home only when her widowed father fell ill.At services, after expressing their gratitude, the church’s congregation would sing. “Il Signore con Noi Dimore” (The Lord Dwells with Us) was Reverend Mother’s favorite song. Gilda and Jennie Otranto took turns at the piano. There was a youth choir and band, with Helen Otranto initially on the double bass and later on the cello, and the Tripi children on the trombone, drums, and clarinet. Eventually, music gave way to silent prayer. By the time it was all over, three hours had passed. It was time to go home and prepare to do it all again the next evening. Frank and Serafina could hardly wait for the next worship. They usually lingered at church well after services ended. Joey would fall asleep in his mother’s lap.Church consumed entire weekends. Members of the children’s band practiced at 10 a.m. before they attended Sunday school at 1 p.m., followed by a 3 p.m. service that bled into the night. Special occasions demanded even more time from Reverend Mother’s congregation. Christmas brought the production of The Birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ: A Play in 12 Parts, “written, composed, copyrighted in 1934 by Rev. Josephine Carbone, ruling elder,” now archived at the Library of Congress. What hubris it took to copyright a story lifted straight out of the Bible. In another era, with her confidence, Reverend Mother might have been a televangelist or religious Instagram influencer. Or maybe she had the foresight to recognize that history would not remember her the way it would a national figure like Aimee Semple McPherson; she committed her name to the page so that there would always be evidence of who she was and the power she wielded.The play’s first act depicts the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel tells Mary that she will conceive the son of God. But the miracolo of Christ’s birth dims in the final act, with King Herod ordering the murder of all children under the age of two. “The weeping of the mothers and the massacre of the innocents,” reads the final line of the script—a stage direction perhaps intended to prompt wails from the audience at La Cappella dei Miracoli. Reverend Mother never failed to extract reverence from pain and fear.What hubris it took to copyright a story lifted straight out of the Bible. In another era, with her confidence, Reverend Mother might have been a televangelist or religious Instagram influencer.The younger Otranto kids had a small collection of toys, given to them by their brother Louie, who’d played Santa Claus one Christmas. They particularly loved the tiny electric stove, manufactured decades before the Easy-Bake Oven topped kids’ holiday wish lists. “We would cut up an apple, put some sugar on it, and bake it, it was really fun for us,” Gilda wrote in her testimonial. But Reverend Mother expected even her youngest followers to make sacrifices—giving up everything that made them happy was a matter of salvation. “I don’t think we had those toys for a whole year because when we started to go to church, we couldn’t play with them anymore,” Gilda wrote. “One day my aunt from Newark came to visit us with her children, they were a little younger than us, my mother gave them all our toys, we were heartbroken but we didn’t say a thing.”Deprivation went hand in hand with isolation. “Once we entered, we could not leave,” Jennie wrote of La Capella dei Miracoli. “We were also told to disassociate ourselves from our friends and relatives who were not members of our church.” Gilda later dictated a family tree to her niece Patricia. “Church kept these cousins apart,” Pat scrawled under one branch. La Cappella dei Miracoli also created an ugly rift in the nuclear Otranto family. Louie and Al refused to attend services. “One night we came home from church and found my two older brothers playing cards with some of their friends,” Gilda wrote. “Well! My father took the cards and threw them away and told their friends to leave. From then on, we weren’t a family anymore, my two older brothers didn’t want any part of this religion. In my father’s eyes they were sinners, and they were only in their teens.”By the mid-1930s, Louie and Al had moved into a furnished room, which would become a refuge for their younger siblings. Each had their own sad story. Joey watched other children playing schoolyard games and sometimes got up the nerve to join them, even though he couldn’t follow their conversations about the secular radio programs and movies that were now forbidden in his life. At least once, a church member spotted Joey playing and reported him to Reverend Mother. “After the service she would call me up to her and I would get beaten by her,” Joey wrote. “One time she had asked my father to make a good sturdy strap for her. My father cut a broomstick and cut leather straps about ½-inch wide nailed to the broomstick. I got hit once with it and never touched a ball again.”Some nights, as Frank drove the family to services, Joey whined for his parents to turn the car around. He would pretend that he’d forgotten to eat—surely he couldn’t attend church on an empty stomach. The excuse never worked, particularly after he started the second grade and “promised God to fast” each Tuesday and Thursday, on Reverend Mother’s orders. “I remember coming home at lunch time begging my mother to give me something to eat,” he wrote. His hunger distracted him from his spelling tests and multiplication tables, but Reverend Mother expected him to give thanks for the ordeal. After school, Joey would kneel on his family’s newspaper-covered floor to say his prayers and “spit to cleanse his soul.”Joey instigated little rebellions that Reverend Mother always managed to put down. Frustrated after a nightly service, he kicked the tires of her parallel-parked car on Sackett Street. Someone informed her of the transgression. “She came out in a rage, took my hand, and brought me back in the church and slapped my face in front of my parents,” Joey wrote. Sometimes Reverend Mother invented more creative punishments for the little boy. “She would ask her chauffeur to go down in the basement and get the dogs loose,” Joey recalled. “She would take me by the hand and pretend to throw me down the stairs to the dogs. It was the chauffeur who did the howling.”By contrast, Joey’s sisters obeyed orders at any cost. Reverend Mother put her congregation’s young girls on guard duty after vandals broke into the church and ransacked it. Helen and Gilda got the most shifts. They slept on the floor until Gilda felt the claws of a rat dig into her blanket. The girls pushed chairs together to form makeshift beds and, they hoped, a barrier against vermin. “[We] were told to keep a stick or a bat near us for protection,” Helen wrote. “Can you imagine if someone had broken in? I don’t think we would be in one piece today.”Helen watched her classmates eat lunch in the school cafeteria on the days that she, like Joey, had to fast. “How I would have relished having a cup of soup,” she wrote. Reverend Mother objected to Helen getting new shoes and clothes for school ceremonies: “She became very angry and asked, ‘Without my permission?’ ” When Helen reached the tenth grade at New Utrecht High School, Reverend Mother insisted that she quit and go to work in a sweatshop. A truant officer overrode Reverend Mother’s command, and Helen returned to school in accordance with the law. “Can you imagine how I felt when I walked into the classroom after having missed a few months?” Helen wrote. “All eyes were upon me, especially when the teacher made a speech about kids who leave school.” After Helen’s next birthday, she was ordered to go back to work: “Of course the little that I earned had to be turned over to Reverend Mother.”Gilda only made it to the ninth grade. After that she babysat for a fellow parishioner who did Reverend Mother’s bidding and looked after her own mother. Serafina’s arthritis had flared up again after several years of relief. “Her knees were swollen and she couldn’t wear shoes, she was laid up in bed for a long time,” Gilda wrote. “Naturally she was told she must have sinned for God to punish her so!” Gilda had to stop caring for her mother when, one day, the church’s heater broke. Reverend Mother claimed that she needed money more than ever. “She told everyone to go to work, and give her their salaries so she could pay for the new furnace,” Gilda wrote. That’s what Gilda did, joining other young women in sewing dresses. Even Joey handed over to Reverend Mother the dollar or so per day he earned selling bananas out of his homemade cart, a converted baby carriage, during summer breaks from school.Of course, not everyone had to make money for the church. There were congregants who served Reverend Mother in other ways. One of them was Jennie.“My mother told the Reverend that she gave one daughter to God”—that’s how Gilda described her sister’s indenture, which began around 1930, a year or two after the Otrantos joined the church. What was Jennie worth, I wonder now: Un miracolo a month, or a year? What did Serafina think when her joints continued to swell despite her daughter’s servitude? Reverend Mother’s only documented ability was her power of persuasion, confirmed by the account of the girl who would grow up to be my grandmother.Jennie cleaned the single-family home where Reverend Mother lived. Filippo, Reverend Mother’s husband, had ceased to matter in her life, financially or otherwise. He rarely attended La Cappella dei Miracoli. By 1940, he split his time between his wife’s finished attic and the tenement where their daughter, Catherine, lived. When Filippo died of heart failure the following year, Reverend Mother threw him in a charity grave with six strangers.Sallustio Del Re, Reverend Mother’s live-in chauffeur, was 13 years her junior and may have moonlighted as her lover. “She and her chauffeur would be out all day and with the little money that she left I would manage to prepare a decent meal for them,” Jennie wrote. “They would sit down to eat and never asked me to join them. I would just stand there and watch. When they were through, she would tell me to eat the little, if any, that was left over.” Jennie then watched Sallustio and Reverend Mother ascend the stairs to go to bed.His intimacy with Reverend Mother, coupled with his sex, meant that Sallustio had power over Jennie. She could neither consent to nor deny him. Once, Jennie wrote, he “came over to me and touched my breast over my clothes.” She didn’t specify her age when the incident happened. I imagine her body stiffening in the dining room chair where she sat, typing up documents for Reverend Mother. Eventually Sallustio left the room without a word. My grandmother confessed to Reverend Mother what had happened, as if it were somehow her fault. “Because of the way we were conditioned, I thought it would be better to tell her,” Jennie wrote.Reporting Sallustio’s assault made Reverend Mother “very angry with him,” and she “wouldn’t let it go.” But whatever Reverend Mother said or did to Sallustio only led him to retaliate against Jennie. Helen Sebastiani, forever grateful to Reverend Mother for orchestrating her release from Kings County Psychopathic Hospital, happened to be helping with chores the day Sallustio stormed in to the house in search of Jennie. He ran up the stairs to the second floor, shouting, “Where is she? I am going to kill her.” Helen rushed Jennie out of the house. “Run for your life!” Helen said.I imagine Jennie taking off “like a bat out of hell,” one of Nanny’s favorite expressions from my childhood. She reached the opposite side of the street just as Reverend Mother emerged from a strange car, driven by someone who wasn’t her chauffeur. Jennie guessed that Sallustio and Reverend Mother had argued, and that he’d left her “God knows where” to make her own way home. Once she arrived, Jennie wrote, “she then rushed up the stairs in a huff.”It was 4 p.m. With nowhere to go, Jennie wandered the streets of South Brooklyn until La Cappella dei Miracoli’s evening service. When she turned up there, Reverend Mother fired her on the spot. “That night I was dismissed from her home and also from playing the [church] piano,” Jennie wrote. “I felt like an outcast, especially when members of the church, not knowing the truth, sort of shunned me. My mother was concerned and asked Reverend Mother what had happened. She told her I had made a terrible mistake on a check. Of course that was a lie.”The lie, at least, let Jennie go home, but only for a while. Like Reverend Mother’s miracoli, her freedom was an illusion.
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Even though you can build any type of website on WordPress.com, from an eCommerce store to a photography portfolio, blogs still make up the majority of our 60 million plus sites. To improve interaction and connection with these bloggers, we tried something new: Bloganuary, a writing challenge throughout the month of January, where we provided daily prompts to inspire people to publish blog posts.Never having run a month long blogging challenge before, we didn’t know what to expect. Would bloggers join in? Would the community appreciate this? But the results were incredible! Thousands of participants joined in from around the world, blogging in different languages. Perhaps what warmed our hearts the most, though, was we got to see first-hand how close our community of global bloggers really is. People liked and commented on shared posts, watched their audiences grow, and followed new sites they didn’t previously know about. But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what some of Bloganuary’s participants had to say (some grammar edits were made for clarity purposes):An excellent initiative. So much variety. I think, “what will I say?” and then come up with something unexpected. Have been on hiatus with my account through some of [the] lockdown. What a great way to get back into the swing of things. Thank you 😊– Storyteller, artandidioms.com#bloganuary was a chance for me to actually live in a community where we write, we read what others have to say and perhaps share our stories with each other. Every individual has a distinctive power through which he communicates with others, some by painting, others sing and we…WRITE. The spark of this whole challenge was how one topic can cause ripples in many ways and how many unique perspectives there are in a single topic.– SaniaDiary, saniadiary.wordpress.com
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